A Day in My Life

Last night I saw a performance of modern dance; Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray at Sadler’s Wells. It’s loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, transferred into the present. The infatuated painter Basil Hallward has been transformed into a lustful photographer and the mysteriously beautiful portrait of Dorian, locked into the attic is now this:

An advertisement shown on a large billboard, for a brand-new perfume; Immortal, pour homme. At times the set and dancing were beautiful, at times the actions and scenarios hilarious at times it was also very dark, such as in the final scene when Lady H finds Dorian lying dead and moments later photographers burst onto the scene to capture the fallen It-boy’s dead face. But at other times, they just failed to pull it off (mainly when a cheesy overscore started to speed up to illustrate the mounting passion of a scene).

In this respect, the events that occurred for me today, echoed the dance. It has been a strange day, one full of moments of complete serendipity jarring with the daily grind of school life. The lists have again started to take over my existence, after a wonderful month or so of banishment; I have been forgetting too much too often and have simply had to resort to listing it all.

Of course, once you’ve written the list and realised how much there is to do, essential pleasures such as relaxing for an hour with some nuts and an episode of Desperate Housewives become guilty. Today at school, when we stopped everything we were doing for one minute in memory of 9/11 for the first time in the day I wasn’t doing something, even those more inactive things which somehow still seem to sap the energy.

There were still plenty of little treats to help the day push forward, like bite-sized chocolates which give you an extra oomph, a burst of energy. The effect however isn’t very long-lasting because there is simply no time for basking in it.

Despite this the small pleasures in life are no less beautiful. Today, my teacher seemed to have lost track of time and let the class go 10 minutes early. On my way to the bus, I felt a strange urge to start running; co-incidentally I was wearing trainers, a backpack and a sports top and a little thing like breaking into a run was made easy, when any other day all sorts of niggles (wrong shoes, heavy shoulder bag…) would have arisen. So I did run, and as I reached the main road a bus arrived. One I would have otherwise missed. Elated, I got on the bus and by the time I was home, of course, not much felt special. A 40 minute walk, comfy new contact lenses, a surprisingly high score in a subject you don’t like at all and serendipitous event like catching an early bus may not last very long, but I’m going to enjoy them as much as I can.